Quote of the Day (Katherine Anne Porter, on Writing)

“I started out with nothing in the world but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don’t know where it came from, and I don’t know why—or why I have been so stubborn about it that nothing could deflect me. But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had—stronger than any bond or engagement with any human being or any other work I’ve ever done.”—Short-story writer and novelist (Ship of Fools) Katherine Anne Porter, born on this date in 1890, quoted in The Writer's Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the Twentieth Century's Preeminent Writers, edited by George Plimpton (1999)

For a fascinating essay on Porter, “the first modern white woman writer to turn Southern racism and machismo and their ramifications into art,” see this piece by Hilton Als that ran in The New Yorker a year ago.

(Thanks to my friend Holly for the continuing inspiration.)

This Day in Baseball History (Walter Johnson Wins 300th)

May 14, 1920—Washington Senators ace Walter Johnson notched his 300th career win—a milestone that, since then, virtually guarantees a pitcher a Baseball Hall of Fame plaque—against the Detroit Tigers, his first opponent 13 years before.

At first glance, Johnson’s win—gained with 3 2/3 innings of relief in the Senators’ 9-8 seesaw win—appears uncharacteristic of the rest of his career. That was not quite so, however.

True, Johnson started 666 games, but he was also his beleaguered team’s chief fireman, appearing in approximately 150 games throughout his career in relief, compiling a creditable 40-30 record with 34 saves.

That endurance and omnipresence on the mound lends great credence to the nickname bestowed on the great righthander by Grantland Rice: “The Big Train.” The veteran sportswriter came up with the moniker not only to refer to the pitcher’s velocity, but also to the way he pulled along his luckless team, who already were a long way toward fulfilling their own dubious distinction as “first in war, first in peace, last in the American League.”

I really haven’t found a satisfactory picture of Johnson in his pitching motion. Oh, there are photos aplenty showing him getting ready to wind up, but he just looks so relaxed. There’s nothing giving you an idea of what it felt like when he had followed through and released the ball and here you were, the batter, staring at a white object you can barely see because, at close to 100 miles per hour, it was seven to 12 MPH faster than the other best hurlers of the time could manage.

If you want a better idea of this, you have to rely on something old-fashioned, the written word, and a thoroughly unexpected contributor to it, in this case: Ty Cobb, he of the .367 lifetime batting average, who saw him in that first game (as well as his 300th win) as a member of the Tigers. “The first time I faced him,” Cobb recalled, “I watched him take that easy windup – and then something went past me that made me flinch. I hardly saw the pitch, but I heard it. Every one of us knew we’d met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark.”

Cobb, it turned out, though always an admirer, also became one of Johnson’s great tormenters by exploiting one of his few weaknesses, a psychological flaw born from his great strength. The Big Train’s fastball moved so much faster than anyone else’s that batters were unprepared if he lost command and hit them.

In August 1915, one of those fastballs knocked the Tigers’ third baseman Ossie Vitt out of the game with a concussion. A mortified Johnson then became reluctant to pitch inside lest he bean hitters. Cobb, Vitt’s teammate, quickly sized up the situation and started crowding the plate, forcing Johnson to pitch to him outside. The change in outcomes was dramatic: while exceeding .222 only once in his first eight seasons against Johnson, Cobb thereafter averaged .435 for the rest of his career against him.

So, I settled for the image accompanying this post. It gives something of that quality in Johnson that so many described as almost Lincolnesque, an almost infinite forbearance in the face of tribulation--in this case, playing virtually an entire career for a team that, with a few notable exceptions (such as World Series appearances in 1924 and 1925), finished out of the money. He felt constant responsibility whenever he stepped on the mound. He had to be in top form because, very likely, his team would offer minimal run support. His 38 1-0 wins—as well as his 26 1-0 losses—remain records to this day.

Johnson was Lincolnesque in another respect: he was a Republican. In 1940, he ran for Congress against incumbent Maryland Democrat William Byron, losing by some 8,000 votes out of approximately 112,000 ballots cast.

He had far better luck with his election to Cooperstown, when he joined nemesis Cobb—along with Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, and Christy Mathewson—in the first group admitted to baseball’s shrine.

Truth be told, I’m not that crazy about that “Big Train” nickname. Even another created for him, “Sir Walter,” perhaps meant to suggest his nobility, strikes me the wrong way—too redolent of a certain English adventurer who, when he wasn’t sucking up to Queen Elizabeth I, was perpetrating genocide upon the Irish.

No, the nickname I prefer is “The White Knight,” a tribute to the unfailing dignity with which he comported himself on the field and off—not a bad role model for today’s players.

Quote of the Day (“SNL’s” Seth Meyers, on the Dow)

“On Thursday the Dow fell 1,000 points because someone entered a billion instead of a million? How is that possible? How is there not a back-up system? When I delete a picture on Facebook it asks me if I’m sure. Why is Facebook more squared away than the Dow? I mean, really!”—Seth Meyers in the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live, May 8, 2010

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, Offering “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat”)

“I say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering.

“You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

“You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs - Victory in spite of all terrors - Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival….

“I take up my task in buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. I feel entitled at this juncture, at this time, to claim the aid of all and to say, ‘Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.’”—Sir Winston Churchill, first speech as British Prime Minister, May 13, 1940

David Cameron and Nick Clegg might have had to move fast in forming their coalition government to calm a nervous market, but their difficulties were nothing compared with the dilemma faced by Sir Winston Churchill in creating an all-party wartime coalition.

At its full length, Churchill’s address to the House of Commons was only about double what I’ve reproduced here. He didn’t waste time in explaining the need to form a coalition government fast to face down the Nazi threat in Norway, the Netherlands, and the expected invasion of his homeland.

Most of all, he didn’t lie about the magnitude of the task he faced. How refreshing that is in the modern age of spin, when governments (and businesses) lie, lie, and lie about the immense problems they face. In the famous image accompanying this post (produced when the photographer yanked away the leader's cherished and ever-present cigar), you can see the bulldog in the Last Lion, to be sure, but also grim, if unwavering, resolution.

Victory did indeed come “at all costs”—not merely the deaths of countless servicemen, but the destruction of the British Empire that Churchill had dedicated his long life to maintaining. But he assured the survival of the nation.

Let there be no mistake about it: Winston had real deficits as a wartime strategist. The other British politicians who possessed quarter-century-long memories of his advocacy of the disastrous campaign in the Dardanelles were right to feel qualms about his military judgment in taking over for discredited appeaser Neville Chamberlain. His urging of an attack on Sicily through the "soft underbelly" of Europe arguably diffused Allied energies for the all-important cross-channel invasion of France.

But time had proven him right about the threat posed by Hitler, so now he had the credibility to promise his countrymen that they could indeed hold off the Nazi dictator. By necessity, Churchill’s defiance was only a holding action until the U.S. and U.S.S.R. could join the fight. But he was beginning to prove that words could prove just as potent as other types of weapons in summoning his countrymen to their frightening but exhilarating challenge.

This Day in Revolutionary War History (Siege of Charleston Ends in Patriot Disaster)

May 12, 1780—Nearly 200 engagements were fought in South Carolina throughout the American Revolution, but the most disastrous for the patriots was surely the Siege of Charleston, a nearly six-week battle that ended with the largest loss of troops by the Continental Army through the entire conflict.

The numbers alone tell the appallingly one-sided loss suffered when Major General Benjamin Lincoln at last surrendered to British forces on this afternoon. While royal forces under Commander in Chief Henry Clinton counted 76 killed, 189 wounded and 70 missing or captured, the Americans suffered 92 killed, 148 wounded, and 4,650 missing and captured. At one stroke, virtually alll 5,000 American troops defending the fourth-largest—and most prosperous—American city were taken out of commission.

Unlike other battles then and now, the American defeat was less about a commander’s folly than a state government’s failure to recognize the danger it faced until it was too late. A well-regarded New England veteran of the Saratoga campaign, Lincoln had been appointed by George Washington to head the Continental Army’s Southern Department, now the prey of the major British effort in the war.

To no avail, Lincoln had urged the South Carolina Assembly to permit the enlistment of African-Americans, as well as to use militia to fill out Continental battalions. Nothing doing: Southern slaveowners were so intent on preserving their property that they refused to allow their slaves to build the fortifications necessary for defense of the city, and Governor John Rutledge did little to help either.

Clinton began moving slowly toward Charleston in February, and by the beginning of April was ready to tighten his chokehold on the city. Lincoln, having hoped that the Carolinians would spring to his army’s defense, found himself trapped. His response to a second Clinton demand for surrender—evacuation, if given 10 days to withdraw his troops—met the expected no not just from Clinton but from a city delegation who told him that if he tried this and left them to the tender mercies of the British, they would destroy his boats and open the city gates.

British forces knew well, if the South Carolina Assembly didn’t, how important this victory was. Hessian Captain Johann Hinrichs wrote in his diary: “It was the only fortified harbor of two provinces which, because of the quality of their products, could to some extent hold a balance against the French and Dutch imports….It is, lastly, a harbor which England can defend with a few ships against the strongest French force, since a sandbank which at high tide is seventeen to nineteen and three-quarters feet under water surrounds the entire inlet.”

For the next two years, under British occupation, South Carolinians would know the smell of fear, as a vicious war of vengeance and reprisals took place on both sides. Lincoln and a number of his officers would end up exchanged for British POWs, but others weren’t so lucky. Ann Hart told her husband that because of his patriot activities, she worried that she was “liable to Banishment…for actions not her own.”

What saved South Carolina in the end were the fissures already developing in the British high command. Clinton and second-in-command Lord Cornwallis had come to feel mutual disdain during the Charleston siege. As a result, Cornwallis ignored Clinton’s warnings about venturing into North Carolina. The following year, Clinton’s initial success would abruptly end as Cornwallis was continually harassed by the newly appointed American commander Nathaniel Greene and saw his forces ebbing in strength with each day.

As for Lincoln, his day of ignominy would turn to triumph only a year and a half later, at Yorktown. During the surrender ceremony, Cornwallis, pleading illness, had attempted to have his second-in-command, General Charles O'Hara, surrender his sword not to George Washington but to the French general Rochambeau. The latter demurred. When O'Hara presented the sword to the American commander, Washington motioned for his second-in-command, General Lincoln, to accept, thereby reversing the disaster the latter had experienced at Charleston.

Horne of Plenty: An Appreciation of Lena

“I told the boys, don’t just count on what the eyeballs see—she runs deep inside, that woman. And she speaks out.”—Redd Foxx on Lena Horne, quoted in James Gavin, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne (2009)

In one of the most memorable episodes of Foxx’s 1970s sitcom, Sanford and Son, “A Visit From Lena Horne,” junkman Fred Sanford tricked the singer—on whom he had a major crush—to come to his home to visit his son Lamont, on the pretext of visiting his “little lame” boy who, of course, didn’t exist. (See this YouTube clip from the show.)

You can see some of the radiance that captivated Sanford—and thousands of other men worldwide—in the image accompanying this post. But it was what “runs deep inside” that made Lena Horne—the singer, activist, dazzler, and legend who died at age 92 on Sunday night—one of the most compelling entertainment stories of the 20th century.

Racism branded Horne indelibly. I found the deeply expressive singing of the latter part of her career more moving than the silky tones of her youth. Much of this derived from the lessons learned of a hard-bitten survivor, someone never doomed to fold up and die like Billie Holliday. That same fierce pride, however, gave rise offstage to a diva who could be tough and prickly.

Well, no wonder. Early in her career, Horne was forced to endure the following indignities:

* hiding her marriage to her second husband, the white pianist-arranger-conductor Lennie Hayton, for three years;

* being dropped from USO tours during World War II when she objected that because of segregation, white Nazi prisoners were seated at her shows in front of African-American U.S. servicemen;

* filming stand-alone musical sequences in MGM movies that could be—and were—deleted in the Jim Crow-ridden South;

* being refused service by a waiter—who nonetheless asked for her autograph; and

* losing the plum role of the mulatto Julie to Ava Gardner in the 1951 film version of the Kern-Hammerstein musical Show Boat, despite the fact that Gardner a) did not fit the physical requirements of the role as well as the light-skinned Horne; b) probably could not act better; and c) certainly could not sing as well (Gardner’s voice had to be dubbed).

Reading about Horne’s scalding anger (depending on which story you read, she threw either a table lamp or an ashtray at a bigoted heckler), one is reminded of the retreat into sullenness of another proud trailblazer: the Atlanta Braves’ Henry Aaron. Howard Bryant’s biography of the slugger who beat Babe Ruth’s record for career homers, The Last Hero, depicts a son appalled at the shameful treatment accorded his strong, powerful father by white society, as well as the record-setting hitter whose life was threatened for his assault on the Babe’s record.

I hope that Horne--like Aaron, receiving newborn appreciation for his accomplishments in the post-steroid era--found a measure of satisfaction in her later years. In the last decade of her life, for all her bitterness, her identity was secure. She told an interviewer, upon reaching 80:

“I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Quote of the Day (John Perry Barlow, on The Grateful Dead as Savvvy Marketers)

“What people today are beginning to realize is what became obvious to us back then—the important correlation is the one between familiarity and value, not scarcity and value. Adam Smith taught that the scarcer you make something, the more valuable it becomes. In the physical world, that works beautifully. But we couldn’t regulate [taping at] our shows, and you can’t online. The Internet doesn’t behave that way. But here’s the thing: if I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to 20 people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my value as a creator is dramatically enhanced. That was the value proposition with the Dead.”—Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, quoted in Joshua Green, “Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead,” The Atlantic, March 2010